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Thursday, September 17, 2015

The ALD Boom - ALD Market Heats Up

ALD Market Heats Up - You bet! Here is an interesting piece by Mark Lapedus on the ALD Boom and it makes you wonder why Applied Materials has waited so long in taking on this market, which they have done now by the introduction of the Olympia Fast ALD / Spatial ALD platform. Many says that it has to do with certain IP ending in 2016. One missing point here though is that Kokusai is not included in the market share estimation for 2014 since they are a ALD top 5 or even top 3 company.

Number of applications for technology increase, and so do the number of companies vying for a piece of the growing market.

Amid the shift to 3D NAND, finFETs and other device architectures, the atomic layer deposition (ALD) market is heating up on several fronts.

Applied Materials, for example, recently moved to shakeup the landscape by rolling out a new, high-throughput ALD tool. Generally, ALD is a process that deposits materials layer-by-layer at the atomic level, enabling thin and conformal films on devices.

Meanwhile, ASM International, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron (TEL), Ultratech and others are also stepping up their efforts in ALD, and for good reason: the applications are rapidly expanding for ALD.

Traditionally, ALD has been used for DRAM capacitor and high-k applications. Now, toolmakers are chasing after some relatively new and sizable ALD markets, namely 3D NAND and multi-patterning for advanced logic. Other emerging ALD markets include fin doping, interconnects,ReRAMs and selective deposition.

“ALD has become more important for chip production,” said Han Jin Lim, an ALD expert and a technical member at Samsung Semiconductor’s R&D Center. “As the structure of a chip becomes more complicated, thinner and more conformal films are required. The quality of the films (must also be) maintained. ALD is the best methodology to achieve them.”

In 2014, ASMI was the leader in the ALD tool market with a 53% share, followed in order by TEL (27%), Jusung (6%), Lam Research (5%), Wonik IPS (5%) and Aixtron (2%), Freeman said.